The Ismailia International Film Festival for Documentaries and Short Films (IIFF) has been a main destination for mainly young filmmakers and cinephiles since its inaugural edition in 1991 founded by filmmaker Hashim Al-Nahas.
Some feel that the festival is even more important in giving new graduates in the cinema industry a space to discuss their concerns and challenges regarding the future of their work than its role as a platform for competition for awards. It was also a brilliant idea of Al-Nahas, director of the National Cinema Centre at the time, to choose Ismailia, a city that is an hour and half from Cairo, as the location of the festival.
His decision made it easier for the younger generation of filmmakers and those who are interested in cinema to watch and exhibit their films. The festival has since become a hub for the exchange of cinematic ideas, discussions, and even the planning of potential productions without the glamour of the superstar attendance that can grip the interests of those who are only looking for fame.
In its 26th edition, which opened on 5 February and closed last Tuesday, IIFF President Hala Galal, herself a distinguished filmmaker, and her team managed to focus on several themes in documentary and short narrative filmmaking. Among them were the ways in which documentary film can deal with memory, historical footage, and documentation. It was also noticeable that many of the films shown at this year’s festival, whether feature-length documentaries, short narratives, or even animations, were based on historical elements.
The festival also hosted several workshops and discussion panels that dealt with similar subjects, such as a workshop on “Memory of Place” conducted by filmmakers Sherif Fathi and Taghrid Al-Asfouri. A discussion panel tackled the same subject under the title “Cinema and the Memory of Place,” with panelists including professor of comparative literature Hoda Al-Sadda, head of the National Organisation of Urban Planning Mohamed Abou Saada, and Director of the Francophone Activities Centre at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Marwa Al-Sahn discussing this subject under the moderation of journalist and writer Mohamed Shoeir.
One of the films shown at the festival that tackled history in an innovative way was the Palestinian documentary A Fidai Film directed by Kamal Aljafari that was screened in the feature-length documentary competition. Aljafari has managed to contact researchers inside Israel who found him footage that included scenes from Palestine before the formation of the state of Israel and even before World War I. Such material is even more precious because in September 1982 the Israeli Army invaded Beirut after the withdrawal of Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat and PLO fighters to Tunisia and raided the PLO headquarters in the city, stealing thousands of books, newspapers, microfiches, and films from the Palestine Research Centre.
In his film, Aljafari does not advocate ordinary documentary storytelling, but instead uses footage of different eras in Palestine to create his own narrative. He refers to the Israeli censorship, which used to make deprecating remarks on the archival Palestinian documents, by putting patches of red on the faces of some of the people in the archival footage he uses in the film. He uses the same colour to make the waves of the sea look like waves of blood, and he also produces images that look like artificial flames in some scenes of the film to emphasise the destruction that took place in the Lebanese Civil War.
Aljafari does not use narration, interviews, or other ordinary documentary tools in his film, but instead employs only sound effects, music, and the writings of the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. He includes scenes of a peaceful Palestine showing its astonishing beauty before it became a place of suffering and destruction with the arrival first of the British and then the Israeli occupation.
The soundtrack to the film is made up of the noise of bombing and armed clashes, possibly referring to the lived reality of the Palestinian people since the Israeli occupation that began in 1948. Sound plays a significant role in the film overall, with the soundtrack being designed by Attila Faravelli and Jochen Jezussek.
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Another filmmaker who has tackled similar topics is the French Sylvie Ballyot, who made her film Green Line about the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). The film was screened as a feature-length documentary at this year’s Ismailia Festival, and it showed Ballyot and cowriter Fida Bizri presenting scenes of Beirut and of the massacres that took place during the Lebanese Civil War. Bizri is the main character in the film as well as its narrator, and she is shown talking to militiamen who were involved in the war, one of them from the Shia group Hizbullah and filmed recently after fighting in Syria.
Ballyot said that at first Bizri seemed to be reluctant to appear in front of the camera, but after the two of them had worked together, she agreed.
The film starts with Bizri talking to a militiaman in the war, asking him about the line that separates the East from the West of Beirut. This line was one of the worst places on Earth during the 15 years of the war. Bizri herself saw several people die on the line, and nobody tried to help them or bury them. These images were in front of her when she was just a three-year-old girl, she said.
Ballyot uses a map, a model, and dolls to bring back memories of the speakers in the film from the point of view of a child. Bizri even speaks to them directly as she tries to push them to explain to the little child that she then was the reasons behind the agony that Beirut then suffered and that became part of its daily life. Most of the speakers have at least one story to tell that made them feel the absurdity and the brutality of the Civil War.
Some speakers in the film have managed to purify themselves of their participation in such atrocious acts of killing, while others still seem to be convinced that they did the right thing in taking part in the war. One of the most important scenes in the film is when Bizri sits with a Phalangist Special Forces leader and an intelligence officer with the Lebanese Communists and discovers that both men feel that the Civil War saw the filthiest acts that they had ever been involved in.
Although they were on different sides during the war and their intention then was to eliminate each other, the atmosphere today is almost friendly, testifying to the idea that what happened in the past will not return in the present or the future.
In one scene in the film Bizri repeats the names of massacres that happened during the war: Ain Al-Remmaneh, Damour, Black Saturday, Tel Al-Zaatar, Karantina, and Sabra and Shatila. It is a bit like the experience of Game of Thrones character Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) when she repeats a list of those she wants to kill before she sleeps.
Ballyot said in a discussion after the screening in Ismailia that she wanted to end the film with her main character, as she participated in the October protests in Lebanon in 2019, which were not only a symbol of hope but also would have been a way of making the main character more active. This would have been the case even though the protests ended in failure like others in the region.
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Another film dealing with history and memory and screened in Ismailia was the Egyptian film And There was Evening, and There was Morning. The First Day directed by Youhanna Nagy. This film seemed to be totally different from the previous two. The title is derived from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament of the Bible, and the audience seemed to be expecting something closer to philosophy than documentary.
The film shows a person chatting with an application on a computer, something like chatting to AI. Nagy seemed to be developing a narrative based on a male character suffering from amnesia. He intentionally uses an old-fashioned computer, perhaps because he wanted to distance his film from the usual aesthetics of sci-fi films.
Scriptwriter Martin Elia has written the dialogue between the human and the machine in a sort of religious style, perhaps putting the audience in the frame of mind that thinks that the film is dealing mainly with questions about the philosophy of creation or existence. The narrator, or the man sitting in front of the computer, asks the AI machine to make memories for him, as if he feels that something is missing from his own life.
The film shows different attempts at creating memory in different places in the world, many of them based on images or old amateur videos, while the stories themselves create different lines of drama. The storytelling is appealing, and the core of the film is based on a strange coincidence – namely that inside each attempt at creating a memory, a glimpse of strange footage pops up. At the end of the film, this seems to constitute the real memories of the narrator: a home video of him as a child with his parents in a family gathering at a birthday party.
Through his film, Nagy tries to pose fundamental questions about human identity and personality and whether memories are their main component. However, the stretching of the last sequence about the family takes the film from discussing philosophical questions to direct reality. The film itself stands on different ground, and finally it is neither a documentary nor a narrative.
Using video archives in documentaries is a powerful way of enhancing storytelling and providing authenticity. Some believe that such materials should be left as they are and not interfered with by the filmmaker, treating them like sacred footage that cannot be touched. However, creativity has no limits, and the three filmmakers whose works were screened at Ismailia this year, Ballyot, Nagy, and Aljafari, all show in their different ways how these materials can be appropriately used without crossing the line of what is allowed and what is not allowed.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 February, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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